Zurich/Basel- Chris Visiting!

Fri. Nov. 6th to Mon. Nov. 9th)

The first weekend of November I went to Schweiss/Switzerland/the Mecca of Herzog and de Meuron architecture (they're Swiss). They did the giant Bluish Cheese Wedge in Barcelona and the new rusted perforated steel building on top of the old brick building raised off the ground, next to the wall of plants, in Madrid.

Anyway, I went to meet up with my main man Chris, to get my birthday present from Tiffany from him, to get my extra camera battery and ND monogram gold flask FOR WATER during my travels, to spend time with distant real Italian family who I've never even met, and to escort Chris back to Barcelona with me. Score! It felt like a day of victory. ("Like...toDAY!" Anyone? ND band show before games?)

We both had long journeys. Chris about 18 hours- driving to South Bend airport to take Greyhound to OHare to fly to London to fly to Zurich to take train to train station to walk to hostel. I took Metro to Intercity train to BCN airport to Basel for a train to Zurich train station.

Here's the first shot of the Alps I think I've ever seen...it went on and on like this. It was pretty amazing, and I really looked forward to landing in these things!

The Basel airport, after I landed. Yeah! Basel Switzerland! This airport was REALLY interesting, because it actually sits on THREE countries!! The weirdest part is that, when I was exiting the airport, I had a choice of either Switzerland, France, or Germany, and their was a point where you had to choose and there was no going back to the other country. And then outside, there were weird fences dividing the countries. Really strange, but really cool!

Hooray EasyJet. This flight here from Barcelona was like 20 some Euro. That's why they don't even serve beverages.

It was pretty sweet seeing the mountains all around the airport, rather than just city. Pretty small city, and the airport was well outside of actual Basel (or the other two cities, being that it was midway between all three).

Here was a little model of part of the airport that I don't really remember, maybe it was a proposed part that was unbuilt.

I didn't find out until exiting the airport (my own fault) that the train from Basel to Zurich was NOT next to the airport. Thankfully I caught a shuttle bus immediately and it was only like 15 minutes- or I would have missed my train to Zurich, which even though it was short, they checked tickets for, and I supposedly would have had to purchase another ticket...and it was like 20 euro, so not cheap for a 1 hour ride. But I made it, here's the station, where I'd be back in a couple days with Chris. And I was off to find Chris in Zurich... Yknow, it was pretty cool, the idea of him flying from Chicago, and me from Barcelona, without cell phones (yes I know people always did this before they existed) and meeting in a predetermined place in a foreign country in a city we'd never been to before- and the best was that it all worked :)

On the train, the scenery was nice. Started reminding me of Christmas.

So after almost heading out of the Zurich train station the wrong way, I made my way across the river and towards our hostel. Chris got in hours before I did, and took a nap and everything. He knew when my train came in so he just started walking, assuming the route I'd take. He assumed right, and I saw him walking down the street. How weird to fly alone to Switzerland and find my brother walking down the street in Zurich!

That was the longest I've been alone (not counting at my apartment) since I left Chicago. 7 hours :)

We started walking around to just check things out, and eventually to find food also. There was one main shopping street, or two connected anyway, next to our hostel, which was small restaurants and shops and stuff, and then across the river, in downtown they had the high end shopping street. We spent awhile looking for some place to eat, until we realized that there was no place that was cheaper than like 25 bucks for dinner! We went to the Coop (grocery store) and had a bottle of generic soda and some of the food they have under the heat lamps in the little deli area, by the pizza. Sooooooo that was at least cheap. We walked into a Starbucks the next day and found out that the coffee was 8-10 bucks a cup. I had never been in such an expensive city.

Anyway, here's a phone booth (didn't know people still used public phones).

Then we decided to sorta go phone shopping. There were tons of phone stores around and we're techno geeks. So we decided to see what kinda phones the had in Europe. Mostly we found lots of slightly different ones, and then also this giant Nokia demo model- you can see the real phones on the left, for size.

There were randomly some stairs leading up somewhere to a park thing. It was a nice view of the street from up there. It was a pretty random place though...

Random long walkway lit by uh, steel beams?

Down the street, we saw a guy uh, making ships in bottles.

A really cool store selling...stuff, set up on these shelves made out of layered cardboard.

We were getting cold after a couple hours and finally headed back to the hostel...and here is our dessert from the Coop, a splurge on Swiss chocolate...with chili peppers and cherries. In the filling. Delicious. And spicy.

Chris enjoyed the chocolate, and laying on the bed.

A few more photos of the nighttime, buildings reflecting off the river.

A view down the river, a few steeples down the river.

A furniture store with a cool desk.

The next day, more walking. The train station!

A giant chocolate store, making bon-bons.

We found an Authorized Apple Reseller and checked out the new products that had been released in the fall, and they were also selling software...like Rosetta Stone. To learn English. Yeah I can't help if that is kinda hilarious.

They had a glockenspiel down the main shopping street, that played music and had people that came out of the clock, on the hour. Kinda entertaining...

...considering how many people were watching and taking pictures of it.

We followed our map to the city park, which was not so big and not so full of grass...but it overlooked the city. And had water fountains where pigeons were drinking.

Nice views.

The fountains had these weird grates over the water under the faucets, which we decided were probably to lean on to get a drink, or to set a bucket on to fill up with water, not really sure...

I also noticed that lots of buildings had little metal things that I decided were boot scrapers, even though apparently it doesn't snow much in Zurich...which was surprising.

In this expensive city, of course they'd have a whole store that just sold belts and belt buckles. Yeah thats what those are. Belts.

The largest clock face in Europe. Chris knew that. You wouldn't have thought, huh? Oh, and also there's Chris.

Cool tree color.

I dunno what this was but the building looked cool.

We started heading down the street towards Lake Zurich. We saw lots of black German cars when we were actually walking around streets used by cars (since most we were on were just pedestrian shopping).

Another water fountain. Zurich is apparently quite proud of their water quality, and they have water fountains everywhere. This guy was vomiting water.

YEAH! There's the mountains! They looked pretty sweet across the lake...

Wicked.

Next to the lake we found another park, this one with actual grass and trees. And this was a WEIRD tree. How the heck did this grow like that??

There was a clock made out of flowers.

We went into a smaller church too.

We climbed the clock tower, to get some great views of the city.

From there headed up the hill- the city is RIGHT next to the mountains. Up the streets into the hills we found ETH, a relatively well-known tech school in Zurich, one I hear about all the time in the field of architecture. Those Swiss guys, Herzog and de Meuron, went to and teach at ETH. It had some cool stuff to look at.

I think this water fountain was supposed to be famous, according to Chris- it has some guy on top of it.

Aaaaaaaaand WE. FOUND. A. CANDY. STORE.

The bright blue raspberries.

We tried to get as little as we could handle, and I just wanted to try like one taste of each candy, each that looked tasty anyway. We each ended up spending like 15 bucks on gummy candies. Oops. Nice thing is, we had some candy for our train trip out of town...it was time to head to Basel and visit our family! Chris and his beard clearly enjoyed the gummies.

We got to Basel that evening and it was pouring. Our Italian cousin, like actually from Italy, Caterina, had her husband Giuseppe come get us from the train station. Basel had street-car type trains and we hopped on those to get to their apartment. We basically got there, said hi, gave hugs (Chris had met her in Italy at a family wedding he went to with my dad, last Spring, and that's how we knew she was in Switzerland) and went to bed. I had never met either of them, but hey, they're family, and they were excited to have us come visit, because I think they were a bit lonely there having moved from Italy. They lived in Rome and I think it was Milan also.

We cashed out and woke up in the morning to meet their little guy Gennaro! He only says a few words, but the funny thing is that he goes to daycare, with kids who speak French, German, and English, at the very least. So he was picking up multiple languages as he was barely learning his own :) He liked saying "bitte bitte bitte" when he wanted something. Please, in German.

Their front cabinet was awesome- it was full of grappa and limoncello. Their after-dinner drinks.

We hopped in the car to drive to THE VITRA FURNITURE MUSEUM!! Vitra is a famous furniture maker of lots of iconic designer furniture, much of it from the 50s and 60s, designed by architects. It was also designed by Frank Gehry...same guy from the museum from my birthday. So we went for a drive. And it turns out, it was in Germany! So I got to go to Germany :) We drove in their minivan-ish thing, that was a Fiat Multipla- interesting looking inside, huh?

They even had a nice sticker on the back for Gennaro :)

He snoozed on the way there, and Chris was taking a picture of him. So I took a picture of both of them.

The museum!! The exterior really tells you what its like inside as well...

The actual factories were on-site as well.

This was a nice facility, dunno if museum or what, but it was designed by Herzog and de Meuron. Kinda cool looking.

A sculpture out front. The museum was mostly in the middle of the countryside, with fields, trees, and mountains all around. Really beautiful, especially in the fall.

Some chairs in the museum- one made out of stuffed animals :)

This was a skylight. Filled with plastic bottles.

Giuseppe guarded sleeping Gennaro while we went upstairs...and took pictures of them from the balcony.

Another skylight.

Windows way up in the roof, with screens over them.

You can see the stairs on the right, leading up to the second story.

Same stairs.

Some secondary building nearby, I think it was conference space, I dunno...but I loved the white chairs.

Look at Gennaro go! He liked Chris more than me- I think he thought the beard was scary. Dunno.

Sweet sculpture!

Then we headed to another art museum Giuseppe knew about, that happened to be built by Renzo Piano...an Italian guy. Who designed the new Modern Wing addition to the Art Institute in Chicago.

It had a fantastic installation by Jenny Holzer, who inspired some of rapid word displays in U2's shows during the ZooTV tour. She does words and phrases in LEDs, moving across many screens. Looks cool. Same artist who had an installation in Bilbao in the other Gehry museum. Some of her phrases were more personal and serious, some were negative and political like anti-war and stuff. But looked cool thats for sure.

These moved across the floor and basically disappeared into the wall, which was cool.

These looked like stairs!

I really wanted to climb inside this tube of LED screens.

Gennaro woke up finally, he was still chilling in his sleeping bag thing.

After we got back we headed out into Basel to see the city, Giuseppe showed us around while Caterina put Gennaro to bed- he wasn't feeling well at that point either. It was drizzling, but we walked around for a couple hours- nice view of the cathedral and the ferris wheel!

Some courtyard with lights as art installation.

Aaaaaaaaand we found another installation, by Richard Serra, also the same guy we saw in Bilbao. Not quite as large and cool, but still large and cool :)

There was quite a little fair going on downtown, outside a former church that had been turned into, I think a dance club, I forget.

And we saw the traditional old government building, I think Giuseppe said the red was the color of Basel, and it had basilisks on it, as did one of the historical bridges. Apparently Roger Federer is from Basel and stood on the balcony on the right, and had a large audience in the square, recently.

It was getting cold and we found the Christmas market, and had the first of many hot spiced wines I would have during the rest of my travels. In German its called Gluhwein, in French its Vin Chaud, and I forget what it was called elsewhere...but it all tasted the same, and it was awesome and hot. Kinda spensive, but perfect.

In said market, we saw the most amazing little puzzle cubes, made out of hardwoods, hand cut, incredibly intricate. And even more expensive. Like not even within the range of possibility of buying. But SO awesome.

After lots of looking and desperately wanting, we finally turned and left without purchasing thankfully.

The best part of the night was finding the Herzog and de Meuron firm. Their gated driveway was the same perforated metal that their art museum in SF is made out of. Cool. I wanted to come back the next day and peek in the windows.

The next day I DID find out what's so great about Caterina and Giuseppe's neighborhood...the Italian Consulate's house/office was there :)

Cool building, interesting brick.

Water fountain. That moved.

Street tram.

We found the Novartis campus, a worldwide pharmaceuticals manufacturer. Who I also knew had cool buildings. We couldn't get onto their "campus", even with the excuse that I was an architecture student. So we walked around outside the fence and took pictures.

Cool. TONS of panes of colored glass.

I would have killed to get inside THIS building!

Outside Novartis, around the city, this was a med facility of some sort. Down those concrete things were windows into the basement.

This green building was all green glass, actually.

We decided to head back to the market. Partly for the gluhwein, partly for some way overpriced lunch (brats), and partly to check out the puzzle blocks again, that the German lady said her son handmade. She didn't seem to remember us from the night before. Chris convinced himself more and more that he had to have a couple of the puzzle boxes. And then, dammit, he convinced me I needed to have one too. So I bought one. They were like 40 euro. Maybe more. I think I tried to forget. But they're pretty amazingly wicked sweet.

This building had a facade removed from the front of it, with a fake tightrope walker on top. Weird.

Right before we got back "home", I took a picture of their key. Hadn't seen anything like it.

And here's the tram stop, as we were heading to the train station, to get to the airport. All glass. Cool. As usual.

Some casino.

And that's all folks. After four days, it was time to show Chris Barcelona. I was excited, since it was kinda home for the past couple months...